As far as I know, only MS Office is currently supported for Excel data connectors. I would suggest to use CSV data connectors instead. They are much faster to open, easy to compare, could be edited directly in Ranorex Studio and no Excel license is required. The only advantage of Excel files is that you can have one Excel file with multiple tabs and that you could use formulas. But that's about it

I second using CSV over Excel based on what you told us. This way you can use any editor that supports CSV (open office, WPS, Google Sheets, etc.). Google Sheets can actually output as xlsx but it still won't work if you do not have Excel installed.